


Með Suð í Eyrum

by jattendrai



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 23:09:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9146182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jattendrai/pseuds/jattendrai
Summary: He never considered it paranoia, but Henry did.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [idaman008 on Tumblr](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=idaman008+on+Tumblr).



> A pinch-hit fic for idaman008 for Portal secret Santa! Sorry to get this to you on January 1st, but I hope you enjoy it!

Doug wasn't exactly a programmer. He also wasn’t exactly an engineer, a designer, a budget counselor, a janitor, a technician, or a programmer either, but Aperture managed to milk his jack-of-all-trades ability to the fullest ( resulting in some long-term arthritis coming to bite him for that). 

Tossed constantly through various projects and background work, rarely having his name anywhere with his help once the project was submitted on paper -- simply, he weaved himself through various sections of Aperture Science, observing all of what was going on, something very few could say they’ve done; usually all projects were done in isolation to one another, and the scientists were fired upon completion upon being considered useless. Doug, somehow, managed through countless of them without ever seeing said release. It was almost a bit sad, on his end.

At the moment, he had been assigned to build the Aperture Science Handheld Portal device. The ‘boys in the back’ had already laid out the clear instructions upon blocks of blue and white paper, the science and general conception of what it must do was already proven and tested, and even the parts have been fresh off the model -- all Doug had to really do was find which part fit which. Crammed in one of the many rooms doubling as a filling space, with nothing but himself to a blinding lamp light on a desk that hasn’t seen cleanup in years, he found quiet, restful peace from the greater looming project that had recently cropped up.

_ Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System. _

The project was never promising to him in the beginning, and feared the day it would come -- if at all -- where his next task involved….  _ It _ . Luckily he managed to shuffle about without even hearing a word of the project, occasionally having it nothing be nothing but a thought fleeting his mind during coffee breaks or when he went to retrieve a new prescription for himself.

Nothing was really stable at Aperture, but the general construction of it all felt pretty solid to Doug at first; pretty on paper, with all the little wirings and bits detailed with shorthand notes and part numbering. She was a beautiful thing at concept, when her prompts were nothing but words on lines with backslashes and dots. It was then when Doug could think of her a bit fondly, quietly, before she was really given life --- that was when the image became murky.

An artist Doug was not -- not at first -- but he could appreciate the fine art of her structure, but standing anywhere close to the massive system when in operation felt like a threat; even before she was given what she needed to live. The way the body swung in idle, seemingly staring down on them as a large structure beyond any human characteristic that could let the eye perceive it as an being of it’s own species -- it left something metallic in his mouth, something that would trickle down the throat and soon bloom as paranoia.

He never considered it paranoia, but Henry did.

Henry, who Doug had met during an early-on project, had somehow managed to hop onto the GLaDOS project before getting the boot. They were at arm’s length with each other, but there was a connection of technical skills that always lead one back to the other somehow, albeit rarely, and his cross into the GLaDOS project because of Henry was never considered a plus to the friendship.

Called in at the beginning to help with some basic framing, helping wire together some parts and overlook the basics of her structuring, allowing him to peek into the world of which was the GLaDOS project. Henry was absolutely ecstatic about it all, going on to Doug about the advancements they had made and what leaps this would take them, running down a list of historical tributes to science that he firmly believed would be trumped once they’ve gotten it to work.

One thing that was never really disclosed to him, something Henry wouldn’t cough up during his fits, was  _ what _ was going to be going into it. Through all the schematics and prompts he’d seen of the creation, nothing about it’s kernel or what exactly was going to run and function as the core of it’s operating system.

 

_ Genetic Lifeform. _

__

It wasn’t really something… spoken about once it had occurred. Employees kept their mouth shut and looked the other way on a lot of things, but after  _ she _ was taken and transferred into a Core ( the one Doug would remember helping construct when Henry couldn’t figure out how to wire it onto the main frame,) it was almost suffocating not to be able to least _ say _ something about it, god dammit.

And Henry still had the gall to talk about it as some brilliant, amazing idea that would revolutionize A.I. technology all while an unwilling women’s mind sat within it, no longer connected to a body controlled by her own accord, but rather plugin commands that would feed her thoughts and strain out her own, no longer commanding a body but a hunk of metal dangling from the ceiling.

That alone made her image in the glass, which could be seen through various office spaces surrounding the massive room they had to place her in just for her body alone, a terrifying one at that. The body that swung idly how harbored a being, a person no longer seen as such. The project was not done yet, of course -- they had to test her out.

And she tried to kill people.

Coming back to it all, in that room Doug sat in with the filing cabinets and blinding lamp and tiny desk and metal chair, he could only think about what had been desensitized by those around him; the computer tried to kill, so they killed her and tried again. There was no switch to turn a human off but oh, was there one to turn off a robot. A Machine. An A.I., something he’ll always refuse to call human anymore.

He enjoyed the seclusion a lot more because of it, in windowless rooms, all by himself with work that wouldn’t evolve the advancement of such a…. Threat.

Maybe this was paranoia. It did try killing people, though.

 

_ Disk Operating System. _

 

The Morality Core certainly was an attempted improvement.  _ Attempted _ being key here: It’s design was sleek, and the concept itself on paper seemed pretty interesting; but Doug, a man captivated with reason over logic, still found the faults that ignited the doubt within him; Not only where they already trying to control a thinking machine, but they were trying to inhibit it, suppress what they could with their own sense of morality -- like playing God.

Of course it came as a surprise when it seemed to have ‘’worked’’, with the word-of-mouth saying that She was finally complete and ready to cooperate. In fact, Doug was so surprised upon hearing that she was now submissive, that he had nearly thrown up in terror. The computer, the one that had gone through countless emergency shutdowns after various attempts that killing her makers, suddenly becoming submissive and  _ excited _ to work with them now, all because they managed to plug a few simple Cores onto her that could apparently rework her entire path of thinking.

They’ve accepted this as truth, right from her own mouth.

 

_ GLaDOS. _

 

It was there he stood, in an almost empty room -- what with everybody going home much later than Doug -- with the massive, apparently now pacifistic A.I., with nothing but the air between them. He couldn’t say he saw the rise of the machine, the birth of what could possibly be the biggest breakthrough Aperture could push, but bits of his cooperation and help lent into the creation of what he was looking at. In a way, he fed into the creation of his own fear.

Comical.

Strangely, almost, he stretched out a hand to meet with the Core, which he could no longer argue as anything but GLaDOS herself now, if she was truly living in there. The outer shell was smooth and cooling, but as his ran his hands down near the optic at the center, he could feel the warmth brought by the circuits passing through. Even in idle she thrummed as if breathing, hummed as if singing, and for a moment Doug felt himself lost in it all; GLaDOS was surely not human, but there was something that left a linger in the air as if there was another being in the room, as if the whirling of the cooling fans in her body were the breathing of another life. 

Carefully he moved his hand so that the curve of the optic sat between the space of his thumb and index finger, and there he stared in the eye -- the eye of the monster.

The warmth of his chest dripped and mixed with the fear at the pit of his stomach, knotting at his sides and shooting through his bloodstream to make such an exhilarating feeling out of such a small moment. She was off -- they had turned her off in preparation -- but that he could get this close to fear that plagued him for months on end as it was built right alongside his work. He couldn’t tell whether to be in awe or disgust of what he was looking at -- the world’s first functioning A.I., or an attempted killer?

Doug’s faced curled back in anger, in disgust, and he hoped the dead A.I. could see everything through the bulb without light they called an optic.

“ Like a burnt-out stop light,” he said, dropping his hand.

His voice echoed with the hums. He wanted to leave, but his eyes kept falling back on the machine as he made his way down the steps of the elevated platform. What he was looking at wasn’t the full picture, but rather just the shell of what it is -- like the beauty he had seen on paper, without the life and reality of what was inside the core, what truly was GLaDOS.

The button was right around the corner in the operating room, something he had keycard controlled access to; there which he could meet the creation himself. One last look at the empty optic gave him the answer he needed.

He’ll wait ‘till Bring Your Daughter To Work Day.

 

Though he’ll wish he didn’t.  
  



End file.
